As communications technology has grown in recent years, the need for communications companies to repair and correct problems at customer premises has expanded, as well. Communications signals over telephone lines use many different communications protocols, such as asynchronous digital subscriber line (ADSL) communications protocol.
Telephone service technicians who are charged with correcting problems with communications signals being received at customer premises have had a difficult time keeping up with advances in communications technology. Communications signals these days are faster than ever. Test sets that display images or readings of the communications signals typically provide the technicians with test results that are often subject to interpretation, which makes determining whether a problem exists both difficult and subjective. Furthermore, as new communications technologies and services are delivered to customer premises, theoretical capabilities and actual operation are generally not consistent with one another. For example, a noise margin that should theoretically be sufficient for proper operation at a customer premise may be adequate for proper communications at one customer premise, which the same noise margin at another customer premise may be inadequate. As new communications technologies and equipment are rolled out, field technicians empirically learn whether communications parameters measured at customer premises are good or bad. Disseminating test information to thousands of field telephone service technicians and training the technicians is difficult and cost prohibitive.
Because of the difficulties with analyzing test measurements taken on communications lines at customer premises, training thousands of new and experienced technicians on new technologies and testing procedures based on empirical test results is challenging, inefficient, and expensive. As test procedures and test parameters may routinely change, often weekly for new communications protocols, the ability for managing and training telephone service technicians with each change can be overwhelming.
Furthermore, as techniques and processes for measuring communications signals at customer premises change, the telephone service technicians will have outdated test equipment, thereby requiring new or updated test equipment to be provided to the telephone service technicians. Providing such test equipment can be very expensive to purchase and distribute throughout the country to thousands of telephone service technicians.